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NASA freezes Starliner missions

(gizmodo.com)
269 points rntn | 2 comments | 17 Oct 24 19:56 UTC | HN request time: 0.406s | source
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renegade-otter ◴[19 Oct 24 14:37 UTC] No.41888004[source]▶
But the shareholders have been taken care of, right? Is the sacred shareholder OKAY?

Never mind that a famed company has been dismantled to pump the stock for a few years (and how long it took is a testament to its former excellence).

https://www.amazon.com/Flying-Blind-Tragedy-Fall-Boeing/dp/0...

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throw4950sh06 ◴[19 Oct 24 14:38 UTC] No.41888008[source]▶
What do shareholders have to do with it? Why are they so different from shareholders of Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook...? Do you really think they are happy now? No-damn-body would trade enormous future profits from one of the biggest opportunities of the future for some measly one-time millions today, in today's dollars. Space industry is going to produce many trillionaires.
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GolfPopper ◴[19 Oct 24 14:54 UTC] No.41888124[source]▶
Any member of management, at any company, whose focus is more on their next-quarter or end-of-year payout (which seems to be most of them), will cheerfully trade enormous future profits for other people for a short-term profit for themselves.
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throw4950sh06 ◴[19 Oct 24 15:55 UTC] No.41888532[source]▶
That's my whole point. It's the management/possibly board, not the shareholders.
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1. GolfPopper ◴[19 Oct 24 16:16 UTC] No.41888678[source]▶
Sadly I expect the vast majority of shareholders would individually trade the future health and profits of the company for their own immediate benefit as well, were they in a position to make the same choice. You're right that since they collectively don't benefit from such short-sighted focus, they wouldn't make the same choice.

It's outside my bailiwick and I'm not quite sure how it happened, but it seems to me that over the course of a few decades (70s to 00s?) we went from a model of corporate management where the various mechanisms of "cripple the company for the short-term benefit of upper management (plus a few well connected others)" were neither sophisticated nor, well, thinkable, or at least not acceptable, to one where both the ability and the practice of doing so are near-ubiquitous.

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2. ◴[19 Oct 24 21:58 UTC] No.41891079[source]▶